So, what about Gaetz? Is Trump’s decision to put him up for Attorney General the ultimate troll? Is it even meant to be serious, or some sort of complicated move that is a test of loyalty, or a way to get Gaetz out of the House, or what? I don’t even pretend to know, but I note the furor it has engendered even on the right.

Gaetz is an unconventional choice, to say the least. Most people think he won’t be confirmed in the Senate, and that’s certainly a good possibility, considering the thin GOP majority there and the presence of people like Collins and Murkowski.

Gaetz is nothing if not aggressive; he was one of the main drivers of the ouster of Speaker McCarthy, for example. McCarthy has said this about the nomination:

Asked for his response to Trump’s Cabinet picks so far, McCarthy told Bloomberg Television in an interview, “I think the choices are very good, except one.”

“Look, Gaetz won’t get confirmed,” he continued. “Everybody knows that.”

McCarthy, a loyal Trump ally while serving in the House, was asked why the former president would bother tapping Gaetz if he knew the Florida Republican couldn’t get confirmed.

“You can talk to [the] president, but it’s a good deflection from others, but it also gives …” McCarthy responded, cutting himself off. “I’ll let it stand at that.”

Pressed again for some insight into Trump’s thought process, McCarthy said, “You’d have to ask the president, but Gaetz couldn’t win in a Republican conference, so it doesn’t matter.”

And then there’s Fetterman, who called it a “God-tier kind of trolling just to trigger a meltdown.”

The DOJ had previously subjected Gaetz to a 2-years-long investigation, which was finally closed in 2023 because of witness unreliability [emphasis mine]:

The investigation stemmed from allegations that the congressman had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl, with the DOJ looking into if Gaetz violated sex trafficking laws in paying for her to travel with him, including across state lines.

The probe was part of a larger investigation into Gaetz’s ally and former Florida tax collector Joel Greenberg, who pleaded guilty in 2021 to six federal crimes, including sex trafficking of a minor, identity theft and wire fraud.

Greenberg was sentenced to 11 years in prison in December. He agreed to cooperate with the DOJ’s investigation as part of his plea agreement.

But the investigation into Gaetz hit a roadblock over concerns about the credibility of two witnesses, one of whom was Greenberg. Career attorneys reportedly recommended to the DOJ in September that the department not charge Gaetz based on those witness credibility issues.

Prosecutors were also worried that testimony from the girl with whom Gaetz allegedly had the relationship would not stand up in front of a jury.

In other words, they offered something to Greenberg if he’d implicate Gaetz, and his testimony (and the girl’s) ended up being too shaky to hold up in court. You can draw your own conclusions about Gaetz’s guilt, but I say it’s most likely they tried to frame him. I doubt there’s much love lost between Gaetz and the DOJ which, as AG, he would be in the position of running.

There’s also a House investigation:

The House Ethics Committee was investigating whether he engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, among other allegations. With Gaetz’s resignation from the lower chamber, the panel no longer has jurisdiction but could still vote to release the report.

Yes, Gaetz resigned from the House yesterday, ostensibly to start the ball rolling on DeSantis appointing his replacement so that the House majority is protected. This may or may not have been the reason.

My gut feeling is that this is certainly not a simple matter, and that both Trump and Gaetz may be playing a more complicated game. I think it presents Senate GOP members with a real dilemma, as well.

But let’s for a moment say that Gaetz is confirmed as AG. I think it would be a scorched earth policy at the DOJ, which is richly deserved for the agency’s behavior under Garland. It’s not as though the DOJ has any reputation to defend.

The post On Gaetz as potential AG appeared first on The New Neo.

“I certainly understand that some have chosen to attack the integrity of the Justice Department and its components and its employees by claiming that we do not treat like cases alike,” Garland said. “This constitutes an attack on an institution that is essential to American democracy, and essential to the safety of the American people. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

No, it constitutes a criticism of that institution, which is not the same as an attack – a word with tremendous emotional valence. Surely Garland understands the difference, and he understands that blurring the two is what really undermines American democracy, or more accurately the American republic.

When an essential institution goes bad, that undermines the principles on which this country is based. Such institutions are not above criticism; au contraire. They must be criticized when criticism is warranted. And in this case there’s plenty of evidence making the criticism valid.

All the outraged huffing and puffing, and declarations from Garland himself that the accusations aren’t true, do not change that fact. They only reinforce it.

The post Merrick Garland: criticize the DOJ and you’re attacking democracy appeared first on The New Neo.

Disband the FBI. We should never have allowed a national police force to come into being.

Move the bits of the government you can’t actually destroy to other parts of the country.

Do these things instantly—the day you take office. The deep state will howl. The bureaucrats will oppose you. The lawyers will sue you. Do it anyway. Act first, deal with the consequences later.

Conduct metaphorical dawn-raids on their people and institutions just as they weaponized the Justice Department against you and your supporters. That would not only be the retribution you seek, it would also be reciprocity. Speed and thoroughness will be of the essence. If you hesitate, if you are half-hearted, you will be lost…

The focus should be on eclipsing Washington, D.C. as the seat of government. It has long been obvious to candid observers that there is something deeply dysfunctional about that overwhelmingly Democratic, welfare-addicted city.

First of all, for Trump to even attempt to do any of that it would be necessary for him to get elected, which I don’t think will happen. But just for the sake of argument, let’s say he does. And let’s say he attempts this in some top-down action – because for it to be done with the agreement of Congress, both houses would have to be in firm Republican control and not just Republican control but control by the most radical elements of the right. So that’s another reason it’s not going to happen.

But again, what if Trump or some Trump-like figure tries to do it by diktat? That would lend credence to the long-claimed idea of the left that Trump has always wanted to be a dictator. And who would be enforcing his directive? The current FBI or DOJ, the Washington DC police force, the Capitol Police? Who would close the FBI offices and/or fire everyone? Wouldn’t Trump himself (or the Trump-like figure) be more likely to be arrested in a coup? And wouldn’t most Americans agree that he should be arrested? Half of America (or even more) may distrust the FBI, but that doesn’t mean they’d be in favor of it’s dissolution in that manner.

And even if most people did approve, the Deep State would not. And they are no longer afraid of the will of the people. Among other things, they believe that they control the outcome of elections – whether through “rigging” achieved by court cases approved by leftist judges, the cooperation of an almost wholly-leftist media, or outright fraud in situations where it can be accomplished, or some combination of all of these things.

To take a different but related topic, what of the criticism of the Durham Report not going so far as to recommend prosecution of anyone involved? There’s this [emphasis mine]:

The fact that Durham failed [to convict any of the Rusiagate perps so far] tells us a lot about the priorities of the Justice Department and partisan elements of the judiciary but little about the truth. Mueller was able to strong-arm guilty pleas from campaign flunkies such as Papadopoulos for not speaking carefully enough, but last year, Durham was unable to secure a conviction against Danchenko for blatantly lying to the FBI. To give you an idea of what Durham was up against, the judge threw out one of the key charges against Danchenko because when he told the FBI that he had not talked to Dolan, the evidence presented contradicting this was in the form of written emails, which did not meet the literal definition of physically talking to someone.

Ultimately, the most damning thing about the Durham report is that it makes no specific recommendations to stop something such as the Trump-Russia abomination from happening again. This may seem like a strange place to arrive at, given the voluminous corruption he documented. However, Durham’s report repeatedly noted how the FBI showed extreme caution investigating anything related to Hillary Clinton’s prodigious corruption and gave her campaign “defensive briefings” when it believed a foreign entity might be attempting to influence her campaign — a marked difference between the aggressive and clandestine efforts to target the Trump campaign.

If federal law enforcement and bureaucrats are going to choose willfully to employ gross partisan double standards and ignore the existing policies and are generally incapable of restrained and prudent judgment, Durham sees no point in putting new guardrails in place.

“The promulgation of additional rules and regulations to be learned in yet more training sessions would likely prove to be a fruitless exercise if the FBI’s guiding principles of ‘Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity’ are not engrained in the hearts and minds of those sworn to meet the FBI’s mission of ‘Protect[ing] the American People and Uphold[ing] the Constitution of the United States,’” Durham concluded.

And believing that Durham’s failure to successfully prosecute is mostly a matter of failure of will and/or active collusion with the perps, and that if only he had had the will to do the right thing he could have been successful, is in my opinion futile magical thinking. That doesn’t mean I believe that Durham left no stone unturned; for example, I find this the best indication that there was something amiss with the investigation:

The ringleaders of this crime against the American people, including Comey, McCabe, rabid Trump-hater Peter Strzok, then deputy assistant director of counterintelligence, declined to be interviewed by Durham, and he inexplicably declined to use his power to compel their testimony.

But did he have the power to compel their testimony? So far I haven’t been able to ascertain whether he did. Here’s an interesting article that mentions they refused the interviews but doesn’t deal with the question of whether he had authority to make them talk to him.

Unfortunately, the situation looks bleak at this point. I hate to be such a downer, but that is what I see.

The post “Defund the FBI”: but how? appeared first on The New Neo.

And that’s the biggest problem of all. If most of the people in this country were united in support of the basic principle that the actions of government agencies such as the FBI and DOJ, as described in the Report, were and are unconscionable, then something could be done about it. Or, they might not have occurred in the first place, because the perpetrators would know there would be consequences if their activities were discovered.

But for quite some time they’e known that, as long as they’re trying to destroy Republicans, they’ll be safe from punishment and probably will even be rewarded. And the MSM that cloaked itself in righteous nobility for its role in bringing down the Republican Richard Nixon because of Watergate will cooperate in the protection and exoneration of the guilty ones now, because they are on the same side as the MSM.

Plus, when government lawyers and operatives do this sort of thing, they are careful to make it very hard to prove an actual crime with intent. That was part of what Durham was up against. What about impeachment? But many are not in office anymore, and at any rate there would never be the votes for Senate conviction. Obstructing an election? Perhaps. But who would prosecute them – Merrick Garland?

The coverage of the Durham Report is quite comprehensive on the right. On the left, it’s minimized, ignored, or subject to goalpost-moving, as I wrote yesterday. Here are some of the articles on the right; there are plenty more: this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this.

Justice cannot be served unless there are enough people who demand it. There can’t be enough people demanding it if the press continually lies or hides the truth, the education system doesn’t teach people the importance of following the law no matter what your political persuasion, and the left engages in an ends-justifies-means quest for permanent power.

[ADDENDUM: Here’s an example of leftist denial in response to the story.]

The post The Durham Report: in the eye of the beholder appeared first on The New Neo.

I’ve noticed in other cases that some prosecutors deal with the Brady rule (the requirement to disclose exculpatory evidence) by using a document dump – that is, giving the defense so much evidence that they will be unable to wade through it in time, or ever. Sometimes this dump is performed very late in the game; sometimes not. But generally the defense in a criminal case has limited resources, often very limited, and simply can’t sift through a mountain of evidence.

This may have been the situation in the case of Jan 6th “shaman” Chansley [emphasis mine]:

In a filing on Sunday, the DOJ said it provided the tapes to Chansley’s attorney during the discovery phase of Chansley’s trial in 2021, therefore satisfying the requirement of producing exculpatory evidence, or evidence favoring the defendant, to the defense counsel…

[The defense’s] Brady claim therefore fails at the threshold, because nothing has been suppressed,” the DOJ wrote, basing it on the claim that it had provided Watkins with the “necessary tools” to identify relevant CCTV evidence notwithstanding the voluminous discovery.

The DOJ has almost unlimited resources; the defense most certainly does not.

More:

[Chansley’s lawyer] Shipley says that the government may have violated Brady because they did not identify the tapes and their nature as potentially exculpatory evidence during Chansley’s trial. Making them available without making sure the defendant knows of the existence of the tapes may constitute suppression, according to Shipley.

“Suppression simply means it went undiscovered by the defendant beyond a point at which it could be made use of,” Shipley, who was a federal prosecutor for 21 years, said. “If the government produced thousands of hours of video and said, ‘There’s a minute of evidence that’s favorable to Jacob Chansley—good luck,’ that production is not an effective Brady disclosure.”

If the DOJ can play a game of hide-and-seek with exculpatory evidence, what good is the Brady rule?

The post What does it mean to <i>disclose</i> exculpatory evidence? appeared first on The New Neo.

Here’s the supposed explanation for the kid-glove treatment of Biden:

President Biden’s legal team has cooperated with Justice Department investigators, helping it avoid more aggressive actions by law enforcement thus far….

One reason not to involve the FBI at an early stage: That way the Justice Department would preserve the ability to take a tougher line, including executing a future search warrant, if negotiations ever turned hostile, current and former law-enforcement officials said.

I was unaware that the DOJ and FBI only got one bite at the apple. But no, they don’t just get one bite at the apple, so this excuse seems nonsensical.

From Jonathan Turley:

The Wall Street Journal has reported that the Justice Department was given the opportunity to conduct the search for classified material in the Biden office and residences, but declined to do so. Instead, it allow uncleared and unnamed private counsel to search for classified material after the discovery of the highly classified documents in the Penn Biden Center office. It was a decision that could benefit Biden greatly, but at a considerable cost to the department itself.

If true, the decision raises additional questions over the independence of top law enforcement personnel.

Ya think?

Bias is so difficult to deny here that I wonder whether they possibly want the bias to be obvious, to demoralize and frustrate the right still further – because, after all, what can the right do about it at the moment? Vote to impeach Garland in the House? So what?

Turley goes on:

This follows a litany of controversies involving both Donald Trump and Biden where the FBI and DOJ have been accused of political bias and unequal treatment. While the FBI recently denounced critics as “conspiracy theorists,” the record of inexplicable decisions continues to grow by the day.

I think Turley means “the record of otherwise inexplicable decisions continues to grow by the day.”

More:

There is no plausible reason why, given the chance, the Justice Department would not want to conduct a national security search itself. After Nov. 2, the Justice Department was aware that material at the top secret or higher levels was discovered in a closet in the Penn Biden Center. It was also aware that the material may have been moved over the course of six years and that other material could be in other unsecured locations. Nevertheless, it reportedly opted to allow uncleared attorneys to search for additional classified material under a type of “look but please don’t read” edict.

As someone who has worked with classified evidence at the TS/SCI level since the Reagan administration, the decision is breathtaking. It effectively replaced well-established national security protocols with an honor system to be followed by persons unknown…

The decision undermines the credibility of the Justice Department in both the Biden and Trump investigations.

Did they have any credibility left, even before this? But he’s correct that this undermines what was left, if anything.

However, the Justice Department continued to defer to Biden’s counsel like a mere pedestrian at a potential crime scene.

I think that’s too kind. Even a rubbernecking pedestrian takes cellphone photos and videos these days, but the FBI did not. In shades of the Hillary Clinton email “investigation,” the whole thing was done on trust.

Oh, and about “preserving the ability to take a tougher line”? Here’s what Turley writes about what he calls that “baffling” statement:

It is akin to saying that I could have used my keys to enter the home but that would have meant that I could not later force the residents to open the door. If it conducted the search, it could record the search, seize the documents, and take any position it wanted after the fact.

Whatever the endgame here, it certainly was never to treat VP Biden (who had no ability to declassify documents taken at the time) as they had treated former president Trump (who did have the right but whom they treated as a criminal instead). Whatever they’re trying to say to the American public, they’re not trying to make sense to any thinking person – they’re just giving the left some (admittedly weak) talking points, and then they’re doing exactly what they want to do.

What is their goal? Perhaps it’s to keep their options open. If at some future point they want to get rid of Biden, they have this weapon. I don’t think they’re planning that now, though. Meanwhile, they can cite “don’t taint our investigation!” if the House wants any cooperation from them in the House’s investigation of the same set of circumstances.

The post Garland’s DOJ: We had to hold back on the Biden investigation in order to save the Biden investigation appeared first on The New Neo.

Alan Dershowitz opines on the Jan 6 committee’s recommendation that the DOJ indict Trump:

“In my view, it’s clearly unconstitutional,” Dershowitz said on Monday’s edition of the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show. “Article One limits the power of Congress through legislative actions. This is not a legislative action — naming a specific individual and referring them to the Justice Department. It’s not legislative and it tramples on the authority of the executive branch.”

“The 14th Amendment provides one specific time when Congress may in fact, act against an individual,” he later continued. “That is if the person was engaged in an insurrection or rebellion, like in the Civil War, and they didn’t act under that provision.”

Dershowitz said that he believes that the Justice Department will accept these referrals and will most likely ignore them.

Also, does it matter that Trump’s actions in question were committed while he was still nominally president? And that he was impeached for them by the House one week before leaving office, but the Senate did not vote in favor of removing him from office? Isn’t that the limit of Congress’s powers against an ex-president for acts committed while president?

At any rate, Dershowitz isn’t saying that Trump won’t be indicted. He points out that the DOJ is continuing with its own investigation and has a lot more power than Congress to do this. It’s my recollection that the DOJ is focusing on the materials seized in the MAL raid. Perhaps because the charges can involve acts committed after Trump left the presidency?

Another separation of powers issue is this one, about which we’ve just learned. This time the offender was the DOJ vis a vis members of Congress:

In an extraordinary intrusion on congressional oversight, the Justice Department used grand jury subpoenas to secretly obtain the personal email and phone data of at least two top House Intelligence Committee investigators back in November 2017 just as they and their boss, then-Chairman Devin Nunes, were assembling bombshell evidence of FBI abuses in the Russia collusion probe, Just the News has learned.

The subpoenas, obtained by Just the News, show the DOJ demanded that Google turn over personal email and phone data from the two senior staffers on Nov. 20, 2017 and that responsive materials were to be returned to DOJ by Dec. 5, 2017.

The subpoenas were delivered during a critical time frame in the committee’s effort to expose the Donald Trump-Russia collusion investigation as having been driven by an uncorroborated political opposition dossier funded by Hillary Clinton. Nunes’ committee was locked at the time in a bitter struggle to force the FBI and DOJ to turn over records to the committee.

So while Nunes et al were trying to get records from the DOJ, the DOJ was using its power to spy on them without their knowledge. How is it that we have finally learned this? Here’s the reason:

The DOJ subpoenas came to light in the last few days when the former committee staffers were informed by Google that their records had been taken, consistent with the Big Tech company’s policy of alerting customers five years after law enforcement takes such actions.

So that’s Google’s policy of giving notice five years later. It’s not the DOJ’s policy, which is probably to never give notice unless someone is indicted and tried for something relevant in the material accessed by the agency though Google or any other similar source.

One of the people whose communications were monitored was Kash Patel, who now says that:

…the DOJ’s subpoenas were an extraordinary intrusion on congressional oversight and raised serious concerns about the separation of executive and legislative branch powers guaranteed in the Constitution…

“Because a co-equal branch of government, we as congressional investigators and Devin Nunes, his staff on House Intel were conducting constitutional demanded oversight of the fraudulent acts at the FBI and DOJ which we now know happened.”

This should be big news but of course most people probably won’t ever know or care.

Here’s the summary by Nunes:

“The FBI and DOJ spied on a presidential campaign, and when Congress began exposing what they were doing, they spied on us to find out what we knew and how we knew it,” Nunes told Just the News. “It’s an egregious abuse of power that the next Congress must investigate so these agencies can be held accountable and reformed.”

Of the two legislative branches, only the House is held by Republicans, and they face the dilemma of having to decide how much investigating to do instead of trying to pass legislation. Of course, any legislation they would pass wouold probably not get past the Democrats in the Senate anyway.

[NOTE: I’m not sure where to put this next bit, but I’ll just put it here even though it isn’t on the topic. Guess what judge had originally ordered Title 42 stopped? Why, our old friend federal judge Emmet “Ahab” Sullivan, that’s who.]

The post Separation of powers, anyone? appeared first on The New Neo.

Here’s an interesting look back at the history of the DOJ, and how it’s been a politicized force for a long time – often but not always on behalf of the Democrats. The article includes suggestions for reform.

I want to add that one of Obama’s less well-known but nevertheless consequential acts was to import large numbers of leftist lawyers into the DOJ during his term. And by “large numbers” I mean large. Attorneys J. Christian Adams and Hans A. Von Spakovsky have written about it here, in a series of pieces that much alarmed me at the time (starting in 2011):

In 2011, we produced the Every Single One series for PJ Media about an unprecedented wave of ideological hiring of leftist attorneys into the career ranks of the Justice Department. The series documented the partisan and radical background of every single one of the 113 new Justice Department lawyers hired into the Obama Civil Rights Division from January 2009 to January 2011.

With the help of PJ Media, we will now be updating that revealing report — and sharing details about the background of Justice Department attorneys hired since 2011. Because we have obtained all of the resumes of the attorney hires in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice since then.

And once again, every single one of them has an intensely ideological background…

When we are finished, you will see that the Obama Justice Department has assembled a law firm of hundreds of fringe leftists to enforce a brave new vision of civil rights law.

Why the Civil Rights Division? Simple — it may be one of the most powerful components of the entire federal government. If a president wanted to “fundamentally transform” the nation, he would likely start with the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.

The tentacles of the Division reach into virtually every crevice of American life.

And that’s exactly what happened, making things much much worse.

You can also read this piece about why Adams resigned from the DOJ.

It was around that same time – 2011 – that attorney Harvey Silverglate wrote the book Three Felonies a Day, a book with the thesis that the expansion of federal law allows the DOJ to successfully target anyone it wishes. This represents a grave and obvious danger to liberty. From the description at Amazon:

In Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior. The volume of federal crimes in recent decades has increased well beyond the statute books and into the morass of the Code of Federal Regulations, handing federal prosecutors an additional trove of vague and exceedingly complex and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets. The dangers spelled out in Three Felonies a Day do not apply solely to “white collar criminals,” state and local politicians, and professionals. No social class or profession is safe from this troubling form of social control by the executive branch, and nothing less than the integrity of our constitutional democracy hangs in the balance.

But as long as it’s the right that’s being targeted, Democrats don’t mind. In fact, they cheer.

The post The politicized Department of Justice appeared first on The New Neo.